Continuous feed material dispensers often dispense from a central location at the bottom of the dispenser. Usually the material being dispensed is a paper material, such as paper towel wound onto a roll. The roll of paper towel might be perforated to assist in determining a length of material dispensed.
In regards to perforated center-feed paper towel dispensing, most prior art dispensers use a funnel shaped orifice that acts as a brake by controlling the tension on the towel as it is dispensed. See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,769,589 to Paukov.
As a towel is pulled from the dispenser, it is forced through an opening that becomes increasingly narrower which requires an increase in the force applied by the user to pull the towel through the narrow end. The orifice is sized such that the force applied by the user to remove the towel increases to an amount higher than the perforation strength of the towel or web material. Continued pulling causes the web to break and provides the user with a single section of towel.
One problem with this method of dispensing is that the orifice needs to be sized to match the properties of the web material being used and it is not easily adjusted to adapt to materials with different properties. Another problem, due to small variations inherent in the manufacturing of web materials (perforation tensile strength, paper weight, etc.) as well as other external factors, is that it is possible that a sheet of material breaks off from the continuous source of the material at a point within the funnel such that it does not leave any additional material protruding from the orifice for the next user to pull.
These types of dispensers can also be difficult to load once the web has been broken or when the supply of material has been exhausted and a new supply must be loaded. The person responsible for reloading the dispenser must try and push a section of the flexible web material through the funnel, at which point the material tends to bunch up on itself as more material is pushed in to move it along the funnel. As more material is fed in and it reaches the narrower end of the funnel, this bunching can effectively clog the orifice the user is trying to load into.